First TV ad goes up Wednesday in North Coast House race (VIDEO)

Now, it’s really GAME ON in the North Coast House race that we took a snapshot of for you on Sunday. Democrat Stacey Lawson will be the first in the 12-person field to air a TV ad when she launches a 30-second piece Wednesday on cable news channels and broadcast outlets across the Second Congressional District, which stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border.

One thing to note: Though Stacey has identified herself as a “progressive, pro-small business Democrat,” at Tuesday’s debate at Dominican University, she doesn’t mention her party affiliation in the ad that she’s a Dem. It’s a sign of the new top-two primary times we’re living in, where the top two finishers in the June primary advance to the November general election. Sure, this is a super-liberal district, but remember, 21 percent of the voters in this district are Decline-to-State voters and 23 percent are Republican.

Lawson, who is polling second behind Assemblyman Jared Huffman with 9 percent of the vote according to internal polls, needs to pull GOP and DTS votes to claw out of the pack behind Huffman, who has 24 percent. So do the rest of the Dems she’s jousting with there like Norman Solomon and Susan Adams.

From talking with a number of other campaigns and analystss, it is unlikely that any other candidate will go on TV to any great extent in this primary, if at all; the cost is too prohibitive for all but a couple of them. That’s what Lawson’s prolific fundraising can buy. She can go from zero name recognition to near the top of the heap in a hurry.